Francois Truffaut ─ The Lost Secret

For Francois Truffaut, the lost secret of cinematic art is in the ability to generate emotion and reveal repressed fantasies through cinematic representation. Available in English for the first time, Anne Gillain's Francois Truffaut: The Lost Secret is considered by many to be the best book on the interpretation of Truffaut's films. Taking a psycho-biographical approach, Gillain shows how Truffaut's creative impulse was anchored in his personal experience of a traumatic childhood that left him lonely and emotionally deprived. In a series of brilliant, nuanced readings of each of his films, she demonstrates how involuntary memories arising from Truffaut's childhood not only furnish a succession of motifs that are repeated from film to film, but also govern every aspect of his mise en scene and cinematic technique.

Anne Gillain is Professor Emerita at Wellesley College and is known for her work in French cinema, particularly the films of Francois Truffaut. She is author of Le Cinema selon Francois Truffaut and The 400 Blows.

Alistair Fox is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Research on National Identity at the University of Otago. He is author of Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema (IUP, 2011).